ATC to The Men Who Loved Her
by NevadaRose
Summary: So many people have asked us questions about "what happened next" that LadyofDodge and I came up with a brief ATC for you. Hey, if we can have an ATC to an episode, we can have one to a story! Enjoy.


**This was jointly written by NevadaRose and LadyofDodge because so many people asked to know what happened next.**

ATC to "The Men Who Loved Her"

Martinez left the _Lupinho_ in Cuba on the way up to Galveston. He was never a particularly bad man, just one who didn't make an effort to stop the evil going on around him. He hadn't told the Captain about Matt's letter, and so no one expected trouble in Galveston. Les McNeill watched and waited until half a dozen kidnapped women had been moved on board before taking the ship at gunpoint. With Carlotta's assistance the women were rescued and either returned to their families or helped to find jobs. The officers and men of the ship were all arrested, tried, and spent time in prison. The ship was confiscated and resold to an American who used it for another twenty years as the _Longhorn_ to ship perfectly ordinary cargos around the Caribbean. The food on board never did improve.

Despite the winter storms, Festus headed for Reno with Ruth and Buck as soon as Frank Reardon returned to Dodge. He helped Matt and Kitty move to Greeley and rent a larger place while they searched for the property Matt wanted. Matt found his land on the South Platte River near the fork of the Cache le Poudre. Its original name was Apple Hill, but Matt changed it to Alamieda Ranch, honoring the young boy who had saved his life and brought him home. He used his father's Bar X brand on the Appaloosa and Morgan horses he raised there. Festus spent a good bit of his time at the ranch, heading off into the hills whenever he felt the urge, but always showing up again and always welcome.

Julie and Newly continued to see each other but didn't marry for several years. Julie opened her restaurant, the _Kansas Star,_ and gave Delmonico's a run for its money as the town grew. She charged slightly higher prices but featured local beef that made both the diners and the ranchers happy. Newly continued in his gunsmithing business and took on fewer and fewer deputy duties. The two of them, and later their children, traveled to Colorado numerous times to visit Matt and Kitty at Alamieda.

Frank Reardon served Dodge another two years and then resigned when the quarantine line moved and Dodge was no longer a railhead for Texas cattle. Dodge City chose to hire a police chief and two constables to replace him and settled down as a growing but sleepy town – more and more civilized each year. Frank moved out to Colorado and worked as Matt and Luiz's partner for a year or two. Gunmen still showed up after both ex-lawmen on occasion, but they managed to deal with that and watched after each other and their families. At one point a local water war saw both men again upholding the law on a posse under the Weld County sheriff, an ugly war that ended in a number of local deaths and introduced Frank to the widow of one of the ranchers. He married her a year later and settled on her ranch, near Matt and Kitty, raising beef cattle and his three step-children. Frank and Carrie had no children of their own.

Doc went back to Dodge for a month or two to help his replacement settle in, but was back in Greeley to deliver Kitty's baby in April. The baby, a dark-haired little girl who they named Eugenia after Sam's first wife, was born soon after the Dillons moved to Alamieda. Matt and Luiz built Doc a two-room house with a wide front porch on a space of land next to the main ranch house, and he used it as both a home and an office. Doc was there to deliver Kitty's third baby in 1892. It was a boy and they named him John after no one at all. No matter how many times Doc told people he was retired, they never stopped consulting him. He did manage a fair amount of time fishing on both the Platte and the Cache le Poudre, and, after he turned seventy-five, Matt let it be known among the local ranchers that anyone wanting Doc's services would have to send a buggy to fetch him and bring him home.

Kitty never did learn to love Matt's beard, but she loved the man behind it, and that was all that mattered. Sometimes she thought back on the early desperate years before Dodge, or the time she had spent running a saloon, but as they settled in she found Matt as good a business partner as Sam had ever been – though the business was sure different – and her skills with bookkeeping and finance were just as important to a ranch as they'd been to the Long Branch. She never forgot the pain of the chaotic and desperate year of Matt's "death", and the love of the men who helped her through it, but having her children growing up around her and her husband lying with her in her bed each night eased those memories into ghosts.

Estelle decided to attend high school in Denver, and, with the blessing of both Matt and Kitty, stayed with Sam during the school term – with Estelle, Sam, and his fiddle coming out to the ranch over the Christmas holidays each year. The Noonan brothers renovated their Denver bar, the _Court Room, _in elegant dark woods and subdued lighting. The bar became a fixture for the local legal community, and the private 'card' rooms saw more legal consultations than poker. After high school Estelle attended college at the Colorado State Normal School in Greeley and taught school for several years before traveling to San Francisco to train as a professional nurse.

Luiz courted and married a Basque girl who he met on a horse-buying trip to Idaho. They built themselves a house on Alamieda and settled down to raise a large family, all of whom spoke some Basque, some Portuguese, and even more English.

The Great War sent both Matt's son and Luiz's boys off to Europe. Estelle joined the Red Cross and went to France as a matron of nurses. John Dillon came home to Alamieda with an English bride. Luiz's second oldest son, Frank Dillon, met up with Estelle after the war, and the two of them sought out Luiz's relatives in Portugal. They found the Alamieda family destitute and trying to raise enough crops to feed themselves on pasture land where all the horses had been taken away by various armies. Frank helped out his father's cousin Bartolemeo, eventually marrying one of his daughters, and Matt and Luiz sent an American stallion and three mares by steamship in 1920 to serve as a basis for renewing the family's equine tradition.

Matt never did make that return visit to Dodge City. He thought about it from time to time in those first years, especially when sitting in the shadow of the old apple tree and looking out over his land much as, in a long ago and far away time, he sat at the top of Boot Hill and looked out over his town. But then Kitty would climb the hill to curl up beside him, or a giggling child would appear to tumble and roughhouse all over him, and he knew that everything he wanted, everything he needed, was right there within the reach of his arms.


End file.
